Washington
A national summit on adjunct faculty members held here Saturday produced both heated denunciations of the forces blamed for adjuncts' exploitation and loose consensus on a proposed campaign to improve their working conditions.
Leaders of the New Faculty Majority, an advocacy group for adjunct faculty members which hosted the summit, offered up a draft document laying out the goals and principles of what it hopes will be a broad-based effort by key players in higher education to improve adjuncts' lot. Intended to secure contingent faculty members better pay and benefits, more job security, a greater role in college governance, and assurances of academic freedom, the document calls for colleges to undertake sweeping efforts to improve adjuncts' working conditions, and for the adjuncts themselves to play a key role in guiding such change.
Maria C. Maisto, president of the New Faculty Majority, described the document as modeled after the framework of another bold effort to bring sweeping change in higher education: the American College & University Presidents' Climate Commitment, which asks college leaders to agree to take major steps on their campuses to promote environmental sustainability and reduce carbon emissions.
"We really don't have the time, or energy, or inclination to reinvent the wheel," said Ms. Maisto, whose organization is even considering trying to enter a partnership with the climate-change campaign to promote their agendas in tandem.
The goals listed in the New Faculty Majority document include drafting an agreement, similar to the climate-change commitment, obliging the people, colleges, and organizations that sign it to take steps to improve the working conditions of faculty members and the learning conditions of students.
No formal vote on the document was held by the summit's roughly 140 participants, who included adjunct faculty leaders, labor-union officials, college administrators, college accreditors, and representatives of student groups. But they offered no major objections to it in discussing it in separate break-out sessions, and Ms. Maisto said in an interview Sunday that she now plans to begin publicizing elements of the document, "Forging a New Way Forward," more broadly, and asking people to formally sign on.
In its list of principles, the document says that any efforts to transform college work forces should seek to improve the lives of adjunct faculty members already employed by those institutions, rather than replacing those people with others hired for newly created positions. "All reform or restructuring efforts should build in some form of protection for currently serving faculty in order to prevent further harm to these faculty who have served in contingent appointments, without proper support or compensation, for so long," the draft document says.
Speaking Saturday to summit participants, Ms. Maisto said, "When we propose changes, there are always casualties, and we want to minimize the casualties."
Calls for Action
Among the panelists who spoke at the summit, Gary Rhoades, the former general secretary of the American Association of University Professors and a member of the New Faculty Majority's board of directors, warned that a growing share of the academic disciplines are coming to rely on adjunct faculty members. Previously associated mainly with academic instruction in the social sciences and the humanities, adjuncts now account for a growing share of faculty members conducting research in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics, he said.
Mr. Rhoades, a professor of higher education at the University of Arizona, gave an account of a distinguished, well-published scientist who, because he has worked several years in academe on a contingent basis, is "suffering from the very same stigma" that a longtime instructor of English composition might face in competing for a tenure-track job.
Adrianna Kezar, an associate professor of higher education at the University of Southern California and the associate director of that institution's Center for Higher Education Policy Analysis, expressed frustration with how little progress has been made by various efforts to improve adjuncts' lives, including campaigns on behalf of contingent faculty members mounted by the AAUP, the American Federation of Teachers, and National Education Association. She blamed part of the inertia on disagreements over how to bring about needed change and the difficulty of coming up with principles for dealing with adjuncts that are applicable to the many different types of colleges in operation.
"Change is happening very slowly," she said. In visiting campuses, she said, she sometimes thinks "it is going to be 200 years from now before we get better conditions."
Several conference participants argued that unionization has led to improvements in adjuncts' conditions. Jack Longmate, a part-time instructor at Olympic College, in Washington, who has been an outspoken advocate on behalf of adjuncts there, stood up and suggested that accrediting bodies could drive change, by taking the working conditions of adjuncts into account in passing judgment on institutions.
Debra Leigh Scott, a writer and independent filmmaker who is working on a book and documentary on the conditions of adjuncts, argued that visual media present an especially effective means of calling attention to the impoverished living conditions and daunting demands that adjunct faculty members face. "One of things we can do as artists is try to hold the gaze of our audience on these things that are unpleasant," she said.
Rich Moser, a senior staff representative for the Rutgers University council of AAUP and AFT chapters, urged summit participants to build broad coalitions on their campuses by seeking to organize students on behalf of adjunct faculty members and doing more to make adjuncts think of themselves as a community.
"Invest in wine and cheese," Mr. Moser said. "Anything that builds community is a step in the right direction."
Not everyone on hand was confident in the success of such campaigns. Stanley Katz, director of Princeton University's Center for Arts and Cultural Policy Studies, argued in a speech that, given how much organized labor has been on the defensive in recent decades, "efforts made now to try to recover earlier conditions of employment are doomed to failure." He also argued that it is naïve for adjunct faculty members to think they might find potential allies among tenure-track professors who are focused mainly on their own research. "Why should those people care about you?" He asked. "They don't. They don't care about their own students."
Members of the audience challenged his assertions, however, arguing that Princeton is too distinct an environment to serve as a basis for predicting how faculty members might behave elsewhere, and that they see the chances of forging solidarity among all types of faculty members at community colleges and most public four-year colleges as quite good.
Leaning Left
Ms. Maisto told summit participants that her group's leaders conceived of the event out of their frustration with the lack of adjunct participation in the White House Summit on Community Colleges held in 2010. More recently, President Barack Obama worried advocates of adjunct faculty members by declaring his intent to pressure colleges to hold down costs. And Vice President Joseph Biden provoked widespread frustration among adjuncts with remarks delivered this month in Pennsylvania, in which he greatly overestimated what college faculty members earn and argued that rising faculty salaries are a major force driving up college costs.
The New Faculty Majority has posted an online petition refuting Mr. Biden's remarks and urging him to fight the exploitation of college faculty members. But, while many speakers at Saturday's summit expressed frustration with a perceived lack of support for their cause from the Obama administration, they were far harsher in their critiques of the conservative, free-market ideology they blame for colleges' increased reliance on a low-paid adjunct work force.
Claire Goldstene, an adjunct lecturer of history at American University, argued that conservatives have pushed colleges to rely more heavily on adjunct faculty members because a lack of tenure leaves college instructors much less likely to speak out on political matters. "There are real political issues at stake," she said.
Deepak Bhargava, the executive director of the Center for Community Change, a group that advocates on behalf of poor people and minorities, urged those on hand to reach out to other political movements, such as those mounted on behalf of immigrants and low-wage workers.
Joe Berry, a labor historian, argued that "the Occupy movement has done us a great favor by changing the context of the discussion from What can we cut?' to What do we need to solve the problem of inequality?"
"This is a rich country," Mr. Berry said. "There is plenty of money—it is just that it is in the wrong pockets."
Matthew Williams, vice president of the New Faculty Majority and a Republican Party official in Summit County, Ohio, said he was concerned that some of the remarks made Saturday could hurt the movement's efforts to appeal to a broad constituency. "We are not a union," he said. "I am going to ask people that they tone down the rhetoric."
For her part, Ms. Maisto said, "We are not going to pander to the Republicans," but, at the same time, she does not want discussions of the conditions of adjuncts to evolve into an ideological debate. "I have a lot of respect for people on the right and a lot of respect for people on the left," she said. "A coalition doesn't have to involve people who are all like-minded."
